Do you consider Beppe Grillo to be a serious politicion? Do you think he is a temporary political trend?
He is certainly something to be taken extremely seriously. His movement has won 8 million votes, gone to 20% from nothing: no organisation, entirely web-based. So it's a fascinating thing, it's very new, very interesting, and there is a lot of work going on about it. I think personally that it is a slightly dangerous thing; there is a slightly dangerous aspect to it, the kind of anti-political thing and nothing else. It's all very well to be anti-political but do you have anything else to say? They don't really seem to be able to build alliances, or at least they don't want to. All those things seem problematic, but there is definitely a massive number of people in Italy who are fed up, and they might vote for Beppe Grillo. They might vote for the far right. They might vote for Renzi because they think Renzi is anti-political as well. I personally think Grillo has thrown away a lot of opportunities and we'll see what happens in the next election, but it is a fascinating thing, what the movement is.
What has been your biggest challenge or challenge in teaching or research, if you have any?
Really what I've been working on the last three or four years, I've been working on a project on radical psychiatry in Italy and the closure of the psychiatric hospitals. It's been very interesting but also quite complicated in terms of the material, the dynamics and the people involved. I'm working on somebody who was extremely popular, an extremely mythical character called Franco Basaglia. So that's been a very difficult project and now it's finished which is a great relief. However, I think that was probably the most difficult thing that I've done for a whole series of reasons - even practical ones such as the archive being on an island, which I've never had before, meant it was quite difficult to get to it.